William Allen

American , 1957
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Painter, printmaker and poet, William Allen has been working in the world of words and interpretation of visual language and literal language for the past three decades. Bringing words to the forefront has been Allen’s longtime focus and fascination.

William Allen’s work has been included in exhibitions at the Museum of Modern Art PS1, the Tate Modern, the Whitney Museum of American Art, Momenta Art, Harvard University, Williams College, Newark Museum, Ann Norton Sculpture Garden, on the NYC subway, and Buffalo metro bus lines. He is a recipient of a Queens Council on the Arts Fellowship, for his Queens street names paintings, and a National Endowment of the Arts Creative Writing Fellowship for Bannister’s Landscapes, a set of poems about the African-American Beaux Arts painter with very telling titles for his paintings. His two published books of poems are The Man on the Moon (Persea and NYU Presses, 1987) and Sevastopol: On Photographs of War (Xenos Press, 1997). Poetry includes “The Largest Glue Factory in the World” (a history of the Newtown Creek), “21 Stations” about the 7 train in New York, and “Linea Eins,” on the German U-Bahn of the Berlin Wall.